In the days when I owned a car, if it needed brake pads, the oil changed, a tune-up, a new muffler – the countless things that keep a car running – I would take it to Arnie’s Auto Service, a neighborhood operation near my office. Every summer this garage would […] Continue reading »

What do you do once you’ve written a play? How do you move it toward production? Dramatists posed those questions to renowned playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck, Doubt) during a visit to Seattle four years ago. “Don’t wait for someone to produce it. Go put it up on […] Continue reading »

When a script has the merit and good fortune (both are necessary) to move off the writer’s desk into production, a lonely orphan is getting adopted into a big, noisy family. The person charged with focusing that family’s talent and bursting energy is the director. He is the hub from which […] Continue reading »

Tribalism is on the march in America. It’s stepping all over our social fabric and dragging it through the dirt. Instead of seeking commonality – those seed-shaped spaces in a Venn diagram – too many of us are too often retreating into factions, refusing to respect opposing views, eyeing the […] Continue reading »

An American doctor, Siddhartha Mukherjee, recently wrote about returning to India to be with his dying father. His touching essay, “My Father’s Body, At Rest and In Motion” in the New Yorker magazine, was as much a meditation on the concept of homeostasis as it was an account of his father’s […] Continue reading »

Two months ago, right on time for the holidays, we received an unexpected visitor from far away. By we I refer to “earthlings” and “far away” means hailing from another stellar system somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy. Our guest was an interstellar asteroid. Immediately after its initial discovery in October by […] Continue reading »

One of my current projects is writing a book about my 19th century ancestors – their circumstances in the old world, conversion to a new Christian denomination, ocean voyages to the new world, and journey on foot, via wagon trains and handcart companies, across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. […] Continue reading »

Sometimes you come across a photo that makes you stop and look, I mean really look, and wonder, and look again. That’s what this photo did to me a few days ago. Maybe it was the sepia tint giving it gravitas, or how the figures stand out against a blurred cityscape, […] Continue reading »

Failure is a stranger to no artist. I need no reminder; failure stares back at me every day. But if I were so oblivious as to need reminding, reviews of John Patrick Shanley’s newest play could do the job. This would be the same writer whose screenplay for “Moonstruck” won […] Continue reading »

Youth who find themselves in challenging circumstances can sometimes catch a break. The fates place in their path a gift in the guise of a good and caring adult. The opposite can just as easily happen, kicking one’s life from bad to worse. I was one of the lucky ones. […] Continue reading »